The Heart to Heart Project

Principal investigator: Kristin Valentino, Ph.D.

The Heart to Heart Project is testing a brief intervention for maltreated preschool-aged children and their mothers to ameliorate the emotional, social, and cognitive effects of abuse and neglect on individual development. We know that the ways in which mothers discuss everyday experiences with their young children have significant implications for their children’s cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Therefore, the main goal of the current study is to determine whether training mothers in how to best talk with their preschool-aged children will improve their children’s social, emotional and cognitive development. The Heart to Heart project was launched in January 2010, and is funded by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, and by the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (supported by NIH grant RR025761).